Sunday 11th June 2017 @ 4:00 AM

Since beginning the Alien Sundays back in 2016, I have been focused on aliens that live in universes that are essentially like our own, with planets and stars and space and what have you. But today’s are not like that. These guys are from some alternate dimension, called Threk’lsho, where physics are different altogether. Human eyes would not even be able to process the images it received from this universe, but that would be the least of our problems since our physical forms would be unable to survive the experience. There is life adapted to this dimension, though:

Hk’Lennsrs

Hk’Lennsrs are a species of beings native to Threk’lsho, having evolved in a cluster of rocks that float around the life-giving warmth of a flaming nebula. We can kind of fathom their living space by comparing it to our own experiences. The fiery nebula is the center of their “star system” and it is surrounded by floating rocks that look like an asteroid field in a movie (not like a real asteroid field). These rocks range from tiny to the size of a mountain, but never the size of planets that orbit our stars. This is a simplified explanation, but will work for now.

These beings, if they could exist alongside a human, would seem to be several stories tall, but in their native dimension they move with the ease that a squirrel might in our dimension. They move around on four tendril legs and their large body/heads are covered in sense organs that we do not understand. They primarily feed by sucking heat out of floating rocks, which have gathered heat by floating around the fiery nebula.

Hebbel is a landscaper of sorts, which means that it gathers together the larger floating rocks that exist in the space of this dimension and tethers them together so that Hk’Lennsrs can build things on them. They do not use buildings for shelter or anything of that sort, but there are reasons why they occasionally need big space for technology. Hebbel actually just likes big rocks. Thinks they’re neat.

Ecking is a courier who travels long distances, and since the field of rocks surrounding the nebula is comparable to the orbit of planets, those are some truly long distances. Because of this, Ecking’s mind has adapted an impressive memory for directions and spatial coordinates.

Fns is a musician, which is actually an occupation more closely related to a scientist in this dimension. Because there is some manner of atmosphere suffusing the space around the flaming nebula, sound can travel all around. Musicians do still create songs for pleasure, but also to study the effects of the music on the universe, or to communicate across the cosmic distances.

A Fact About Hk’Lennsrs: This dimension, if not the system around the flaming nebula, has been visited by the multiverse-protecting wizards called the Wallfixers. They have waged a war in this realm against higher dimensional beings that we would describe as demons. Though the Hk’Lennsrs are not involved in this conflict, they have seen the effects of it in the distance (to make it understandable to the human mind, think of it as if they are seeing smoke and explosions on the horizon, but on a galactic scale), and spent much time debating what it could possibly be.

Sunday 19th October 2014 @ 6:36 AM

Okay, as I got tired of sketching Superheroes and Supervillains I wondered what kind of characters I could sketch next to continue my Super Sundays. Well, if I’m going to go on fleshing out the Universes I have begun, I figured they would need a lot of just strange and supernatural creatures. So today I begin Supernatural Sundays with a couple of real weirdos.

The Unwelcome

The Unwelcome is not from here. The Unwelcome does not belong here. It is not from the ocean, or the desert, or the forests. It is not supposed to be on this planet.

The Unwelcome is not human. The Unwelcome is not nice to humans. It has not been seen by almost all humans. The few humans who have seen it can not tell what they saw. They know what they didn’t see (a bear, a shark, a tree, a lamp, and so on), but their human minds can not fathom what they did see. Did they see anything?

There are, of course, also those humans who see the Unwelcome but don’t have a chance to remember. The Uwelcome does not leave its victims in one piece.

Okay, I drew this sketch during my Supervillains year, but didn’t know what it was about. In the end, when I decided that a more general “Supernatural” Sunday was next, I decided to save it for that. I figure it is a monster from another dimension that blends into humanity by making us utterly incapable of knowing anything about it.

The Tonguecatcher

Floating through the night as silent as a balloon, the Tonguecatcher peers through windows at the sleeping populace. If it happens to come across some sleeper with their mouth open, their tongue exposed, the Tonguecatcher will open windows, shake the sleeper awake, grab their tongue and pull. Once it has the tongue separated from the victim (it doesn’t seem to care one way or another if the victim lives or not), it flies off into the distance, though nobody knows where it goes, or what it does with the tongues it has taken.

The idea of a silent being floating around and looking in windows for someone to attack is, I think, generally pretty creepy. That sort of invasion of the place where you are sleeping has got to have been one of the first terrors that humanity dealt with. I always considered the Cacodemons from Doom to be a personal favorite, so I drew some inspiration from that.

Sunday 14th September 2014 @ 4:00 AM

Yorgok

Yorgok is a traveller from another dimension. A ten foot tall, monster-lookin’ guy, he wandered onto Earth one day through some kind of swirly portal that appeared in the air. Though his mission is purely one of exploration, he does not consider the living things on Earth to be his equal, so he treats us as we would treat ants. Armed with a super-powerful raygun, Yorgok goes about all manner of scientific surveys of the planet, happy to kill any humans who come too close.

I fully admit that the primary creative factor of this character is that I noticed that I hadn’t done a Super Sunday character that started with the letter Y. At the time of sketching, I didn’t feel like just making someone who was called “The Yellow Werewolf” or something easy like that, but apparently I was fine making up a gibberish name. Also, I am a fan of rayguns, so I threw one of those into the mix.

Seems like a cold-blooded alien scientist might be a good villain for a robot with a personality, like the Robotomaton.

The Verman

The Verman is a humanoid rat guy with a penchant for murder. As one might expect, he spends a lot of time hiding in sewers and other dark areas, only coming out to strike. The Verman seems to be of human-level intelligence, but makes no effort to communicate with humanity, so his origins and desires remain a mystery. He wears armor and uses weapons, but how he got them is unclear. The only thing anyone knows for sure about the Verman is this: he is dangerous.

The superhero Club Man was an exterminator in Ogretropolis, so he is perhaps the ideal opponent for this humanoid rat guy. A tough, but kinda dumb human versus tough, and unusually intelligent vermin.

Sunday 31st August 2014 @ 4:00 AM

Captain Krakk

When Dr. Malevolence was defeated by her superhero enemies for the umpteenth time, her teleportation technology went haywire and sent her spiraling through various dimensions. Just barely managing to save herself, Malevolence found herself stranded in a strange dimension populated by crustaceoid beings that were apparently as intelligent as humans. Arbitrarily, she picked one of these beings and offered him the benefit of her technology if he would serve her. And serve her he did. This crab-like man, named Krakk, became Malevolence’s loyal military leader, helping her raise an army to conquer not only that world, but to bring back to Earth with her once she was able.

Now Malevolence is home again, but she maintains a interdimensional portal in her secret laboratory. Captain Krakk is in charge of things on his world, living in a palace built by the strange Earth technology and using his army to keep the rest of the populace as slaves. While he must occasionally quell uprising of his people, he is also summoned to Earth to aid his benefactor in her times of need.

I wanted to draw some kind of lobstery guy, so I did. I think I was at least partially inspired by General Traag, the leader of Krang’s rock soldiers from Dimension X on the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, so I tried to create a similar-feeling for Krakk’s backstory.

Propheseer

An old man with a big book. Where the Propheseer received his book is not known, but it seems to contain factual depictions of future events. The bad news is, the book describes dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of disasters that will befall the human race. The good news is, it ends with the wounded remains of humanity recovering and forming a new and better society. That future ideal world is the Propheseer’s motivation. To bring that happy place into existence, he has to make certain that the disasters happen. But since the Noblewoman came onto the scene, disasters are having a harder time wiping out humanity.

Is there any hope for the human race? Would we be better off just wiping the slate clean and starting over? I’ve known people who are down on the world and have said that. But I consider that a defeatist attitude. My superheroes would be about making the world a better place through hard work, not giving up and trying anew. I’ve already given Noblewoman a few villains this year, but she seemed a good fit for this concept, so she gets another.

Sunday 3rd August 2014 @ 4:00 AM

I have enough villains sketched and colored to get me all the way through what remains of Supervillain Sunday year! Let’s get going:

Axkiller McGee

There is a group called the Weird Assassins. When a young girl discovered she had the ability to make any kind of ax, from battleaxes to hatchets, appear in her hand at will, she knew she could find a way to make that into a life. Luckily a love of money and a belief that human lives were not worth all that much meant that she could find work among the Weird Assassins, being hired to take on the strangest assassin cases in the business. Unlike many of the Weird Assassins, Axkiller McGee enjoys being a bit theatrical and will try to make her hits in as public a forum as she can while still expecting to get away. That kind of risk-taking has made her a frequent combatant against superheroes, which would normally be a no-no for an assassin, but her success rate means she is still able to find work.

I admit, after I drew this character it took me forever to come up with a name. Once I wrote down “Axkiller McGee” I knew I needed to take a break for a while. So I did. Anyway, I said when I made Killercat that I would probably do more Weird Assassins, and I knew this was a sketch that would fit into that loose-knit collection of killers for hire.

Hypnogre

The portal between Ogretropolis and this strange world called “Earth” is too small for an ogre to get through. But humans seem to be the perfect size for such dimensional travels. Hypnogre is an ogre hypnotist who has taken to controlling the minds of humans and forcing them to do his bidding, smuggling things to and from Earth to create a thriving criminal trade empire.

Full disclosure: Marq came up with the name “Hypnogre” after I complained to him that all the “best” ogre names (ie. Electrogre, Technogre, Necrogre, etc.) were all taken according to Google. The fact that an ogre hypnotist fit so well within my existing creations just proved it was meant to be.